The carbon fibre recycling industry is not yet able to operate at full capacity. This lack of potential is a repercussion of a low demand for recycled carbon fibres (rCF) to manufacture new composite materials. As a matter of fact, few semi-products containing recycled carbon fibres are available on the market. Moreover, rCF semi-products available do not allow to manufacture high performances composite parts. The MANIFICA project, based on highly realigned carbon fibres after steam thermolysis, aims at producing new semi-products from recycled carbon fibres for high performance composites. In this article we introduce the I2M/Université de Bordeaux re-alignment process producing continuous tapes made of highly aligned long discontinuous fibres. These tapes are then used to manufacture new intelligent rCF semi-products. In the first part, the mechanical properties of rCF composites based on different semi-products are compared. In the second part, several semi products based on realigned fibres tapes are presented. This work demonstrates that high performance products can be targeted with recycled carbon fibres, thanks to the development of these intelligent semi-products.

Recycled carbon fibres (rCF) were generally chosen for their low price and environmental features. However, performances of composites made of recycled carbon fibres are often too low to compete with lightweight alloys and glass fibre composites materials. As performances of rCF composites depend strongly on the fibres architecture, new semi-products with long and aligned recycled carbon fibres were developed by MANIFICA (Cleansky European Project). The use of long (up to 250mm) and highly aligned recycled fibres now provides rCF composites with excellent mechanical properties. The purpose of this work is to assess the performances of composites manufactured with these new rCF semi-products. Semi-products with distinct architectures developed by MANIFICA are first presented. Then mechanical performances of composite plates manufactured from the different semi-products are evaluated. Results are finally compared in order to identify the effect of the manufacturing parameters of the semi-products on the final composite properties. This crucial information will allow end-users to select the right semi-product to design recycled carbon fibre composite innovative parts.